Russian strongman Vladimir Putin may be the only person in the world with the legal right to authorize the release of classified documents that could exonerate Hillary Clinton for one event undertaken while she was Secretary of State.
As Breitbart News has reported, in 2010 an interagency committee on which she served–the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS)– approved the acquisition of majority control in Uranium One, a Canadian company that owned 20 percent of American uranium deposits, by ARMZ, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rosatom, a nuclear energy conglomerate owned by the Russian government.
It is a political irony arising from the former Secretary of State’s own failure to abide by the terms of a 2008 Memorandum of Understanding with the Obama administration in which she promised to publicly disclose all donors to the Clinton Foundation so as to avoid possible conflicts of interest exactly like the one she finds herself in with the Uranium One-ARMZ transaction.
What is indisputable is that Uranium One executives and investors — including Chairman Ian Telfer — donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013, and those same executives and investors pulled in millions of dollars in profits as a result of the 2010 transaction that was quickly reviewed and approved by CFIUS, a nine member panel of which Secretary of State Clinton was a member, on October 22, 2010.
Telfer’s $2.35 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation, given through his family owned Fernwood Foundation, was not publicly disclosed until 2015, more than six years after the initial contribution was made in 2009. The news was one of the key revelations made in the new book by Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash, which was published by HarperCollins on Tuesday.
The New York Times has also reported that other Uranium One executives or investors — including Paul Reynolds, Frank Holmes, and Neil Woodyer, donated at least $1.3 million and possibly as much as $5.6 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013.
Had Clinton disclosed to her fellow CFIUS panel members the previously unreported Telfer donations and the reported but not widely known donations of other Uranium One related parties in 2010 when they reviewed and approved the Uranium One-ARMZ transaction, she could have avoided the public relations disaster now confronting her campaign.
But Clinton apparently concealed that information from everyone involved in reviewing the deal at CFIUS, and now the public wants to see the documentary evidence surrounding the private and confidential deliberations of the panel, which consists of representatives of seven cabinet departments (including Treasury and State) and two independent agencies.
The secretive agency, however, claiming that the enabling law and associated regulations prohibit the release of any information related to the transaction (a notion Breitbart disputes as it relates to the process as opposed to the confidential information of the parties to the transaction), refuses to release any details about the controversial 2010 transaction.
One man, however, has the legal right to release all documents in possession of the acquiring company related to the CFIUS approval process: Vladimir Putin.
By law, parties to CFIUS approved transactions are free to release all communications to and from CFIUS related to the transaction.
ARMZ, the company that acquired a 51 percent interest in the publicly traded Uranium One in 2010, went on to acquire the remaining 49 percent in 2013, when it took the company private.
Though there are subordinate executives at ARMZ, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rosatom, the nuclear energy conglomerate owned by the Russian government, as well as at Rosatom, the ultimate boss is Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sergey Kiriyenko, the head of Rosatom, is a long-time Putin loyalist who can be reliably counted on to do exactly what Putin wants. The two men are in frequent contact, as evidenced by an English language translation of a “working meeting” the two held earlier this week in the Kremlin, posted at Putin’s official website as President of Russia. It is very clear in this translation that Kiriyenko is providing a performance report to his boss, Putin.
Russia’s role as a dominant player in the international uranium market, a position enhanced by the 2010 Uranium One-ARMZ transaction, was a key point of discussion.
“The cost of one kilogram of Uranium or one kilogram of the fuel we produce has gone down by an average 10 percent. It was mainly possible due to the competitive environment we have created everywhere,” (emphasis added) Kiriyenko reported to Putin.
Though the publicly released transcript of the Putin-Kiriyenko meeting makes no reference to the status of the Clinton related 2010 CFIUS documents in the possession of ARMZ, both Putin and Kiriyenko are likely well aware of the leverage those documents give them over Clinton.
If Putin wants Rosatom’s ARMZ to release the CFIUS documents, it will. If he does not want that to happen, it won’t.
For her part, Clinton has claimed she had no influence on the CFIUS approval process in the Uranium One-ARMZ transaction, going so far as to release a statement from the State Department representative on CFIUS at the time, former Assistant Secretary of State Jose W. Fernandez, who said, “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter.”
That may be all well and good, but it is not the kind of evidentiary proof that will quiet former Secretary Clinton’s critics.
That proof is now in the hands of Vladimir Putin.
What we don’t know is whether that proof is exculpatory or damning.
Putin, undoubtedly, has reviewed that file thoroughly and knows exactly what it contains.
In a political debacle of her own creation, Clinton now finds herself in a position where, in order to prove that she was not beholden to Uranium One executives for donations made to the Clinton Foundation prior to the CFIUS approval of the sale of their business to a company owned by the Russian government, she is now beholden to the authoritarian leader of that same Russian government.
Breitbart News has asked the Clinton campaign if the former Secretary of State has called on Putin to release the documents related to the 2010 CFIUS approval of the Uranium One-ARMZ transaction now under his control, but has received no response.
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